John Stevens had a benign and constructive presence among British musical and literary scholars for several generations, beginning in the late 1940s when he was made a Bye-Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and extending virtually to the day of his demise on 14 February 2002. His eminence as a musicologist and the exalted reputation he left behind amongst his musicological colleagues seem all the more remarkable when one considers that he passed his life as a university teacher of English literature. From 1954 until 1974 Stevens was University Lecturer in English in the University of Cambridge, then Reader in English and Musical History from 1974–8. In 1978 he was appointed Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English in the University. Despite Stevens' profound and sympathetic musicianship, it was the critical traditions of English literary studies that shaped his intellectual temper.
